Method of and apparatus for promoting the understanding of a text by using an abstract of that text

Abstract

A method and an apparatus for extracting text information for use with a computer system including an input unit, an output unit, and a storage is described. The storage is loaded with documents, abstracts thereof, and relational information indicating relationships between a sentence of the abstracts and sentences of the documents. In response to a selection instruction from the input unit, a sentence is selected from the abstracts such that the documents are accessed so as to extract therefrom, based on the relational information, sentences associated with the selected abstract sentence. Information related to the associated sentences thus extracted is outputted to the output unit. According to the method and the apparatus, text information such as important portions of a document and a list of words appearing in the important portions can be easily obtained by use of the abstracts.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.